Posted By Daniel Greenfield On November 3, 2013 @ 9:05 am In The Point | 18 Comments

Pictured: Not Orthodox Judaism

In the past I have met with Rabbi Avi Weiss and was impressed by him. Despite his liberalism, he was deeply passionate and engaged in Jewish causes; something that has unfortunately become all too rare among liberal clergy.

Rabbi Avi Weiss’ views have become more radical over the years and he has found enough financial backing to set up a school of left-wing community organizers disguised as a rabbinical institution.

His Yeshivat Chovevei Torah is a factory for turning out Anti-Orthodox and Anti-Jewish left-wing activists. Shmuly Yanklowitz is one of the more rotten examples of a rotten lot. Their goal is to attack and undermine the Orthodox Jewish community through deception. blackmail and manipulation.

They are the tools of people like George Soros and funded by them.

Taking all that into account, his complaint in the pages of the Israel Times about the refusal of the Israeli Rabbinate to recognize him is misguided. There is no reason for an Orthodox Rabbinate to recognize a Rabbi who runs a non-Orthodox seminary… while insisting that it’s Orthodox.

When his seminary’s leading student, who was invited to the White House by Obama, writes leftist claptrap like…

“We have made too many mistakes throughout history, thinking that the Messiah is a person or event… I would like to suggest that we are Moshiach—we are the ones we have been waiting for.

While there are some important things to learn from the Reform movement, I believe that it was a mistake to take messianism out of the liturgy—we repair the world through activism”

… why in the world should the Israeli Rabbinate put any stock in Rabbi Avi Weiss’ religious credibility? If it can’t put any stock in the Rabbis he makes, how can it put any stock in his conversions?

Rabbi Weiss complains that some American Rabbis are whispering bad things about him in the ears of the Israeli Rabbinate. They don’t have to whisper. They can just print out and fax material like this.

The new religion coming out of YCT is a generic liberal Tikkun Olam ideology replacing a traditional Judaism that believes in a messianic redemption, a return to Israel and a rebuilding of the Temple… with a Tikkun Olamish “perfecting of the world” through community organizing for social justice.

It replaces Judaism with Liberalism, it replaces Rabbis with Community Organizers and it replaces G-d with the “Idea of the divine in each of us”.

This isn’t Orthodox Judaism and shouldn’t be treated that way. If Rabbi Avi Weiss is no longer being treated as an Orthodox Rabbi, it’s because his YCT involvements telegraph the fact that he has opted out of Orthodox Judaism.